The Fool's Progress Page 12

  Everyone but Red Ginter. Never lifting his bat from his shoulder, he waited for the pitch he wanted. Which never came. Red went down on called strikes every time, spat in the dirt and said nothing.

  At the end of the fifth inning the score stood 14 to 12, Blacklick leading. The sun hovered close to the roof of Prothrow’s barn on the hill to the west. Henry and Tony agreed to end the game after seven innings.

  In the sixth inning each team batted around the order, scoring on fumbled grounders, dropped fly balls, wild throws, doubles by Stan Watta, Jock Spivak, Tony Kovalchick, Chuck Tait, Will Lightcap and Henry. As he waited on second, wiping his brow with the felt of his cap, Henry thought for a moment he saw Wilma smiling at him. But he couldn’t be certain, she sat so far away in the encroaching twilight among a cluster of other girls, all of them smiling, laughing, talking. Laughing at me? he wondered—the pride in his two-base hit sank before the pain in his lonely heart.

  Red Ginter struck out again, letting three fat pitches float past through the center of the strike zone.

  Blacklick scored five runs in the top of the seventh, taking advantage of fly balls to the Fetterman boys, bouncing grounders to the Adams brothers, a throw to first a little wide that Red would not reach for, and an intentional walk to the left-handed Dominic Del Poggio, who replayed Jock Spivak’s stunt by stepping across the plate to hit the pitch-out into far left field.

  Nobody on either team hit a true bona fide home run. The pasture fence stood four hundred feet away at the nearest point. Beyond the fence and a row of trees ran the creek and beyond the creek lay Prothrow’s cornfield, twenty-five acres of stubble and weeds.

  In gathering darkness and deepening gloom, Blacklick ahead 21 to 16, the home team came to bat. Last of the seventh. Last chance. Chuck Tait, leading off, intense and eager as always, hit the first pitch inside first and down the foul line for a triple. His fifth hit of the game. Tony Kovalchick, still pitching, sighed wearily and faced Will Lightcap. Will doubled again, scoring Chuck, and Henry singled, scoring Will. He took second then third on wild throws by Panatelli in left and Carci at second. Blacklick 21, Stump Creek 18, man on third and nobody out. Sonny Adams walked. Clarence popped to second. Junior Fetterman popped to the pitcher for the second out, Henry holding on third. The end was near: Elman Fetterman, Stump Creek’s last and poorest hitter, the final hope, stood limp at the plate. But Elman tried, he went down swinging, and the catcher—massive nerveless impassive Dominic—let the third strike get past him. He groped for the ball while Stump Creek hollered at Elman:

  Run Elman run!

  Elman ran. Dominic found the ball, whipped it toward first and hit Elman on the rump, spurring the child facedown into the base. Henry raced home, Sonny took second and Elman stood up on first smiling happily with his second big hit of the day. Two runners on base, two outs and the score now 21 to 19.

  Top of the order, Red Ginter. Hope—stifled by reality. Henry had to call him in from far left field, where he’d been hunting for Leroy. Red slouched toward the batter’s box, holding his private bat by its rough-cut, heavy end. He spat in the dirt, inverted the bat, took his stance. Feet far apart, shoulders hunched, towering like an impotent Goliath over the plate, Red stared blank as a zombie at Kovalchick and waited for the first pitch, the inevitable but slowing fastball down the middle.

  Will rose from his squatting position beyond third, where he was coaching the runners, and contemplated the tiring, exasperated pitcher. Henry, watching from the bench, saw Tony Kovalchick touch the silver medal at his neck—St. Anthony—make the sign of the cross and begin his final windup. Red stopped chewing.

  Kovalchick leaned back, one leg high in the air, about to rock forward and lob the pitch—

  Fuck the Pope! shouted Will, loud and clear.

  —released the pitch, awkwardly, his body rigid, off-balance, and threw weakly into the dirt halfway between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. The ball dribbled crookedly toward the batter in little rabbity bounces.

  Ball one! yelped the umpire as Red stepped forward this time, confidently, and swung down like Sam Snead with a driving iron and caught the ball with his slashing club as it made its last pathetic hop toward the plate. A flurry of dirt rose in the air, as if Red had dug too deep and missed, but every ear present heard the sharp crack! of hickory meeting hardball with magnum impact.

  There is a certain special unmistakable sound that ballplayer and fan recognize instantly, as if engraved on memory and soul among those clouds of glory on the other side of birth, beyond the womb, long ago before conception when even God Himself was only a gleam in a witch doctor’s eye.

  The sound of the long ball.

  All faces turned toward the sky, toward the far-flung splendor of an Appalachian sunset, and saw Red’s departing pellet of thread, cork, rubber and frazzled leather rise like a star into the last high beams of the sun, saw it ascending high, higher and still higher over Jock Spivak’s outstretched despairing arms in the remotest part of center field, far above the fence, over the trees and beyond the creek, where it sank at last into twilight and disappeared (for two weeks) in the tangled fodder of Mr. Prothrow’s cornfield.

  Sonny Adams followed by Elman Fetterman came trotting across home plate, dancing in delight. Blacklick 21, Stump Creek 20, Stump Creek 21. The home team swarmed with joy around the runners, waiting for the last and winning run.

  But where exactly was it? that winning run? Where was Red? Red was nowhere. Red was everywhere. Red stood in front of home plate leaning on his bat, watching his first hit of the game vanish into immortality somewhere southwest of Stump Crick. Run? he said. What the hell you mean, run? Hit’s a home run, hain’t it? What the hell I gotta run round them goldamn bases fer? He spat a filthy gob of tobacco juice into the trenched soil at his feet, shouldered his bat in disgust and strode down the red-dog road, headed for Ginter’s hollow.

  Blacklick claimed a tie, 21-21. Stump Creek claimed a victory de jure, 22 to 21. The discussion never was settled to the satisfaction of anybody except maybe Red Ginter. And Leroy, who didn’t care one way or the other. Old man Prothrow found Leroy that night bedded down in a stall on cowshit and straw, between two heifers, when he checked his cow barn before turning in.

  The fight between Will Lightcap and Tony Kovalchick, Stan Watta and Jock Spivak also ended, more or less, in a draw. Called on account of darkness.

  V

  No team spirit, Chuck Tait complained. I don’t think I’ll play with you guys anymore. You hillbillies just don’t have the right team spirit. Chuck was a town boy; he lived in the heart of Stump Creek in a brick house with coal furnace, plumbing and electricity. His father was village postmaster, owned the general store, drove a new Buick. Chuck joined the Army Air Corps in 1943, learned to fly a Mustang P-51, and would return from the Pacific Theater with captain’s bars and a chest covered with ribbons. He started an insurance business and later evaporated, forever, into the state legislature. Red Ginter joined the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of master sergeant for life. Leroy joined the Salvation Army and became a major general.

  And Henry? Henry Lightcap fell in love. He fell in love that year with Wilma, with Betsy, with Donna and eleven other girls. He knew his cause was hopeless but he tried. Though it was not Wilma or Betsy or Donna or the others but Mary, Tony Kovalchick’s little sister, who provided the needed succor. One rainy night in May, in the backseat of Will’s 1935 Hudson Terraplane, Mary Kovalchick showed Henry Lightcap a thing or two. Henry joined Mary. She conjoined him. For a number of times. He never again went back, after that, to throwing tennis balls at barn doors or baseballs at Roman Catholics.

  Will Lightcap, he stayed with the farm.

  So it was and so it all really happened down there in that Shawnee County, in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, about five thousand years ago.

  5

  The Dog Returns

  Me and Solstice the dog and another soggy sixpack, bound for the high country. The old Dodge r
umbles on, my horse, my love, my Rosinante—truck chassis, oversize tires, granny gear for rocky roads, the convenient floorboard ventilation system. Elaine’s Toyota was—is—new and I paid for it but that’s all right, I like this thing better anyhow. For the long haul. For gypsy living.

  We stop to give a lift to a White Mountain Apache on the edge of the town of Globe. Fat, moonfaced, hungover and redeyed, stinking of whiskey, he climbs in, sags half dead against the door and utters not a word all the way to Cibecue. Forty miles. Suits me; that’s the kind of conversation I prefer on a bright and golden Arizona afternoon. We climb two thousand feet from the desert onto a high plateau creased with narrow little canyons where sycamores grow among dry rocks, limbs flung out in crazy, electrified abandon. No leaves yet: still winter at this elevation. One bat-eared microwave relay tower stands on a ridge, insulting the uplands, passing its stream of oily lies through the innocent air. But that can be ignored; I ignore it; gaze instead across the cold clear classic gray-green integrity of the landscape.

  The altimeter on the dash reads 6400. Good. A good height from which to contemplate the misery of the lowlands. But it ain’t that easy; I’ve dragged the misery with me. It’s still creeping like strontium through my bones, weighing on my heart like lead poisoning. I know, I know, only an idiot has no grief—but I am bored with grief.

  A flashy new pickup truck with cherry-bomb tailpipe brays past me on the upgrade, cutting the double yellow line. Two humanoids sit in the cab wearing the bright well-pressed cowboy shirts and immaculate white hats, with high crowns and rolled brims, of Marlboro men. (That awful laundry bill.) A shotgun and a rifle rest in the gun rack. Two saddles in the bed. No detail has been overlooked: a sticker on the rear bumper reads COWBOYS DO IT BETTER.

  By God that’s true, I think. Ask any cow. How would you like to spend your working hours six months a year sitting on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow? Imagine the effect on the simple tabula rasas of our grandsons of the pioneers. The Cowboy and His Cow: The Tragic Truth Behind the Myth.

  Onward, through the scrubby woods and past a solitary winter-shaggy horse in a huge and lonely field. The field looks lonely, not the horse. Why is that?

  We descend into Salt River Canyon, leaving the Tonto Forest behind, perhaps forever, I don’t know. Tonto means “fool” in Spanish. Fool Forest and the Lone Ranger’s batman.

  The Apache at the far end of my front seat appears to have passed out, but when I approach the branch road to the village of Cibecue he comes half alive and makes clear through gestures that he wants out. I drop him off. Without a word he staggers away, weaving down the centerline of the road north. Will probably make it home by nightfall and if he don’t he’ll sleep off his drunk in a grassy comfortable ditch. Voluntary simplicity.

  I pop the top from another Coors, drive on for a mile or two and stop again. This weak green watery beer races through a man like a diuretic. Standing among the jackpines of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, I shower the pine needles with a gentle acid rain, training my golden stream on a large black ant that I’ve caught in the open, bombarding his armored head with golden droplets the size—from his perspective—of volleyballs. Angered and dangerous the ant scampers about trying to find the source of this deluge. I back off, button up, satisfied and relieved. Every man has his phobia: my pet phobe is the ant, the anthill, the formic way of life.

  I fill the dog’s water dish and watch her drink. She’s thirsty, dehydrated by the long drive through the cactus country south of Globe. Her ribs stick out through her dull black coat, her eyes are sad and lusterless, her muzzle dry. Not long for this world. She’ll soon be out of it, lucky dog.

  I gaze into the depths of the forest. A thousand Ponderosa pines straight and tall, conscious of my alien presence, wait patiently for my words, for my decision, for my departure. A sweet dark stillness broods in there, yes and black bear too, mule deer, wapiti, Merriam turkey and oblivion. Once again I ask myself the simple obvious question: Why not? Why suffer anymore? You’ve lived over a half a century now, you’ve had your share—the love of a number of beautiful women, the friendship of enough good men, the test of blood, muscle, nerve and skill in some lovely, dangerous and very strange places. What do you want? Why not go for one last walk in the woods, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return.

  My dog watches me. She looks concerned, sympathetic but not alarmed. She knows me better than I do.

  We climb back in the truck, roll onward. Into the town of Show Low, named for the turn of a card that cost one partner his half of a cattle ranch. I think of Will and Marian clinging like oak burls, clinched like nails to their 120 acres back home in Shawnee County. I lower my beer out of sight and coast into town, admiring the familiar highlights of Show Low, Arizona:

  LOG CABIN MOTEL, GAS: DIESEL MECHANIC ON DUTY, BEST WESTERN—VACANCY, PINK PONY STEAK HOUSE, FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST JESUS, CENTURY 21 REALTY, PANAVISION TV, CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, A&W ROOT BEER, SAFEWAY, YELLOW FRONT, TRU-VALU HARDWARE, AZTEC REALTY, 40-ACRE PARCELS $295 PER ACRE, GALLENO’S MEXICAN FOOD, SWEET THINGS BAKERY, TAYLOR’S EQPT RENTAL, and forty-four more of the same.

  This here child needs hot coffee if we’re gonna get into Gallup by midnight tonight. I pull over at Mom’s Café and belly up to the salad bar. There is no salad bar in Mom’s Café, there never is. I hunker down on a stool at the counter, order coffee and doughnuts.

  “Ain’t got no doughnuts,” the little blue-haired waitress says. She looks older than my mother. I say, “Make it pie.” “What kinda pie?” “What kind you got?” “Coconut cream.” “Forget it—just bring me coffee.” She brings the coffee, weak as tea but boiling hot, in an undersize mug with false bottom. She looks tired, she looks downright weary, she’s old enough to be my grandmother, anybody’s grandmother, and she should be home in front of the Tee Vee right now, crocheting mittens for her great-granddaughter.

  She starts to go. “Are you Mom?” I ask her. “Yes but I ain’t your mom, mister.” “I mean are you the Mom that owns this café?” She points. “That’s Mom over there, readin’ that Penthouse magazine.” She means the slender little man behind the cash register at the entrance, the Asiatic type who looks like the latest refugee from Ho Chi Minh City. They’re here, they’re everywhere, our many chickens coming home to roost.

  “Where are you from?” I ask her. “Oh I ain’t no native either,” she says, “I was born in Springerville, that’s about thirty-five miles down the road.” We both pause for a moment, thinking about things; I sip my hot thin coffee. “Well,” I say softly, as if to mollify the resigned anger I sense behind her eyes, “like we say, it’s a free country.” “Yep, it’s free,” she replies, “free of charge.”

  I drink a second cup of coffee, leave Grandmother an overgenerous tip (spoiling the natives) and pay the tab at the cash register. The little man with the sculptured features, skin drawn tight as a mask over his Vietnamese skull, puts down his magazine and gives me a quick grimace of a smile. He too looks tired, melancholy, lonely—from Saigon to Show Low is a longer journey than any I ever made—and I can imagine, too easily, the images of fire and torture and loss and unappeasable hatred that must torment his sleepless nights. Human, the poor devil, like the rest of us, too human for his own good.

  Out of here.

  Into the sweet air and the smell of yellow pine, into the grasslands among the ancient cinder cones, into the freedom of the open range. Good God but it’s a relief to escape, if only for an hour, the squalid anthills, big or little, Show Low or Shanghai, of twentieth-century man. A world without open country would be a universal jail.

  The old Dodge races onward, wind roaring at my ear. My dog sprawls on the seat, nose toward the window. A few horses graze on their thousand-acre paddocks. A good life for a horse. On the western ridge a windmill spins in the breeze, silhouetted against a sunset that spreads from horizon to horizon. Far to the north, sixty miles away and a thousand feet below, I s
ee the rosy barrancas of the Painted Desert and a few purple volcanic buttes on the skyline. Those are Hopi lands, enclosed within the much bigger reservation of the Navajos. Nobody envies the Hopi.

  A car approaches and passes with headlights blazing—it’s getting dark. I’ll never make it to Gallup tonight. I watch for a side road and when it appears drive for five miles eastward on a dirt track through no-man’s-land, public land, cow country. Bats, grasshoppers, nighthawks flicker through the air. I pull off the road and park among junipers. Sweet smell of cedar on the air, the music of space and stillness in the sky. There are no lights visible anywhere except above: Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, the Big Dipper, the North Star, great Orion.

  We go for a walk, my dog and I, watching the sunset die by slow degrees on the western sky. We walk for miles on the dirt road, see nothing man-made but a corral and loading chute and windmill. My belly hurts; we return to the truck. I fill the dog’s water bowl, pour a ration of Purina Hi-Pro Krunchies into her feed dish and give her another Nizoral tablet, encased in a lump of cheese, for the fungus in her lungs.

  I know, when a man’s best friend is his dog that man needs help—professional help. I understand that and I acknowledge it and I say to hell with it. I eat my supper, a fat warmed-over cheese burrito spiced with hot salsa, drink one more beer, and go to bed in the back of my truck, wrapped inside the familiar greasy comfort of my Peace Surplus mummybag. (Korean conflict: Truman’s War.) Sollie beds down on her old saddle blanket on the ground, under the rear bumper. I think of the sad little man at Mom’s Café: thank God us Lightcaps skipped the Johnson-Nixon War.

  6

  1943-45:

  Will’s War

  I

  Diaspora of the Lightcaps.